My word: co-operative
Good words, Words words words
Siôn Whellens is client services director at Calverts, a worker co-operative offering graphic design and print services. In a guest post for Polon, he talks about the dog-helps-dog world of co-ops.
Calverts: three decades of co-operation
Calverts has been going for 32 years as a common ownership co-operative, but we were taken completely by surprise when David Cameron said he wanted to turn chunks of the public sector into worker co-ops. A few hours after the policy announcement, a Channel 4 News crew turned up on our doorstep, wanting to know what these worker co-op things were all about. Don’t know if they left much the wiser.
We know that all the major challenges facing our society — reducing inequality, mitigating climate change, implementing a Green New Deal, democratising the digital economy — will require a major dose of human co-operation, a lot of dog-helps-dog. And of course, the best way to deliver co-operation is through co-operatives.
I’d be less sceptical of the Cameron conversion to co-operativism, however, if he was advocating it for private industry or core operations of the state, and urging his people to make themselves eligible for .coop (instead of .gov and .com) top level domain names. Cops.coop, anyone?
This is the latest in a series of posts looking at the language behind the issues.